Yuki
by Kuroi Ruusu
Summary: It's snowing over Domino. Ryou watches the snow, and dreams about a past that can never return.


I return! I forget how long it's been since I last posted, but better late than never, ne? It's snowing here at the moment. Well, not here, exactly. The problems of living in the middle of a city with people generating so much heat... But it should be snowing, like it is at my house. So I wrote the shortest little one-shot in existence as a tribute to the snow, as a kind of silent exhortation for it to come to me...

Title: Yuki (Snow)  
Rating: Something tame and innocent...  
Disclaimer: If I were to say I owned this, I would be lying. Satisfying my delusions, perhaps, but lying nonetheless.

For Casey.

A/N: Amane is Ryou's sister. Or was his sister, before she passed away.

**Yuki**

It was snowing in Domino. Over the high buildings and radio masts and silent, sleeping citizens the flurries fell in great flakes, laying softly over parked cars, lamp posts, pavements empty of the usual hurrying crowds. At night the city took on a new life. A silent life, calm, unrushed. And silently the snow tumbled from the starlit sky, and silently it settled in a frosty, glittering blanket in the peace of the night, to await the coming of morning.

In the window seat of an apartment block near the outskirts of town, a boy sat and watched the snow. With his white hair and impossibly pale skin he almost blended in to the screen of falling silver, save only that he was motionless against the ceaselessly shifting backdrop.

There was no light to illuminate him, nor to impede his view. In an apartment dark as the night sky he sat, bare feet white and ghostly before him, shivering slightly in the single black jumper wrapped around his delicate shoulders. His midnight eyes were emotionless, staring blankly into the monochrome night, following first one flake, then another. It had not snowed in Domino for a long time. Not since he was a child. He was still a child, in some respects. But his mind was older.

Last time the snow had lasted only days, but he and Amane, a white-haired, white skinned girl so much like himself, had stayed out until half frozen, faces flushed a delicate rose by the pinching cold. He remembered her laughing face, her sparkling, emerald green eyes, the silver hair tangled and windswept and dotted with tiny beads of water where the snow had melted. And she had smiled and reached up to brush the snow out of his eyes, out of his hair, and he had taken her hand – so small, so fragile – and it had been warm in his. They ran and slid and laughed in the snow. And they had built a snowman in the park, in a sheltered corner where no one would disturb it, and she had named it and forgotten to take home the hat that she had placed on its frozen, inanimate head. The snow had meant something else, then. It had meant the carefree joy of youth, the unquestioning love of siblings, and it had been theirs: two pale, pale children in the white, white snow.

It was different now. Now the snow was beautiful still. But this beauty held no excitement, no bright-eyed joy. This beauty was cold and still and soft as death, this beauty was to be watched, not touched.

With his back pressed against the shocking cold of the glass, he sat and watched the snow. And he remembered. He remembered her face and her eyes and her wonderful white hair so much like his own. Still her voice eluded him, as it had since the day she had died. But that did not seem to matter. How much she would have loved this snow. He wondered if she would have sat with him now, no longer a child, and simply watched. In his mind she was laughing, pulling on his hand as she had before, urging him to come out and play with her, so restless and full of happiness. She had been like one of those spirits in the fairy tales, he thought. One of those which could be seen in the distance if you were fortunate, always laughing and playing. One which granted wishes and then disappeared into the air as if it had never existed. As if she had only been a fairy tale, to be told and then forgotten.

The boy sat and remembered and watched the ever-falling snow over Domino, in the silence of the night, in the safety of the dark. And slowly his eyes slipped shut, and slowly he, too, fell into the starlit nightscape of dreams. And outside the window the snow fell on unhindered, and settled over the sleeping city in a glistening blanket, awaiting the coming of dawn.

~ Owari ~

Please comment! Enough comments to match the number of snowflakes, preferably...


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